The Power of Location

“Location targeting is the holy grail for marketers.” This
statement was directed to an entire industry at Mobile World Congress by Sir
Martin Sorrell, CEO of the world's largest advertising company by
revenues. While this may be a revelation of a new reality to some, the
geographer reading this might be saying, "Where's Waldo?" The
so-called first law of geography from Waldo Tobler is "Everything is related to everything
else, but near things are more related than distant things.” This was recently validated by analysis of
Wikipedia. More recent research shows a basis for even more ways to exploit
this power. In "The Limits of Predictability in Human Mobility,"
a peer-reviewed paper in Science
magazine, the authors report after studying 50,000 cell phone records over
three months that, "by measuring the entropy of each individual’s
trajectory, we find a 93% potential predictability in user mobility." We
may have free will but we make the same choices nearly every day.

Businesses are investing in the power of location. Gartner predicts that revenue generated by consumer
location-based services will reach $13.5 billion in 2015, with advertising
being the dominant contributor. Location targeting more than doubles the performance
of mobile ads. NPR radio listeners, for example, are more eager to engage
and share in social media based on local content.

We all know the explicit value of turn-by turn directions,
but the value of location is implicit in other services that that use location. Location may not be a direct consumer
product, but rather an intermediate good as the basis for many services. Monitor
and change your environment for health. Play games based in the real world augmented
with interesting information. We have only begun to see how our lives will
change. Bring your own device; just make sure it is always-connected,
always-located.

For location to be valuable but it must be accurate.
Technology for location quality is good but it needs to improve. While not
quantified, a repeated speculation is that "roughly half of all venue
data on Facebook and Foursquare is not accurate.” There's an emerging industry focused
on delivering quality geocoded locations. In the rush to meet the need, some
short cuts are being taken. The dirty little secret of LBS ads is the use
of “inferred” lat/lon locations. Inferred should be interpreted here as a
really rough guess. Location data quality will vary and it is important to
match accuracies to the use. It is “important for decision makers to
understand the accuracy of the available geocodes so that they have a sense of
the level of confidence they can place in the data.” - wise guidance
from John O’Hara, Pitney Bowes.

OGC is addressing location quality. The OGC Spatial Data
Quality Working Group surveyed a thousand geospatial data suppliers
and users around the world. The survey provided feedback supporting OGC’s
development of terms of quality measure and a robust spatial data quality
model. Standards developed on this framework will enable more effective and
reliable evaluation, sharing and use of geospatial information, improve data
analysis and ultimately influence policy decisions. OGC is not specifying quality or fitness for use; we focus on how to express this quality in a uniform way.

A Point of Interest (POI) standard will lead to higher quality
location information. OGC is creating a standards working group to standardize
the POI conceptual data model and XML encoding. This builds on work done in the
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This POI standard will allow comparison of
location data from multiple sources, resulting in increased quality. This work
in OGC has begun with the OGC
OpenPOIs Registry: A database of points of interest information
containing names and point locations for millions of businesses and civic
places across the globe. The OpenPOI Registry is to be a comprehensive
directory of links to other POI databases having the actual information about
the places themselves. Access is free and the data is open to all to use.